SIR WALTER SCOTT

BY

THE RIGHT HON.
GEORGE WYNDHAM, M.P.

MACMILLAN AND CO., LIMITED

ST. MARTIN'S STREET, LONDON

1908

NOTE

The following pages contain the speech in which
the Toast of Honour was proposed by the President
to the Members of " The Edinburgh Walter Scott
Club " at their Fourteenth Annual Dinner on the
2()th November 1907.

IS

Sir Walter Scott

My Lord Provost and Gentlemen — Any
man rising to propose " The Memory of Sir
Walter Scott " in any gathering must needs be
abashed. Should he keep to the beaten path,
Charity herself could but say with Dr. Johnson
that his speech " contains much that is true and
trite." Should he digress from the obvious,
Justice must add with the sage, " and much that
is original and ridiculous." But when, as now,
a speaker born south of the Tweed stands con-
fronted by " The Edinburgh Walter Scott
Club " ; when, as to-night, your President, less
fortunate in that capacity than twelve of his
predecessors, can claim no bond of nativity with
you and the subject of your loving reverence ;
why then, gentlemen, he can only reflect that
you are wholly responsible for the aberration of
your choice, and claim acquittal for his conduct
of the case, " If" — as Sir Walter was so fond of
quoting — " If, so he be in that concatenation
accordingly."

Not for me the privileged nonchalance of

3

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SIR WALTER SCOTT

my predecessors ! Of, say, Mr. Haldane, with
his easy "In this Our dining-room, restrained
from the criticism of . . . outsiders, we may
let Ourselves go a little about Ourselves."
From that point of view your President is an
outsider. But I make no apology for intrusion.
From any other point of view, and there are
many, I may say to you, with Plutarch's old
soldier who found a solitary freedman perform-
ing the funeral rites of Pompey the Great, " O
Friend . . . thou shalt not have all this honour
alone ... to bury the only and most famous
captain of the Romans." From any other point
of view, I expostulate with Byron : —

Scotland ! Still proudly claim thy native bard.
And be thy praise his first and best reward.
Yet not with thee alone his name should live.
But own the vast renown a world can give.

My concatenation is cecumenical. But do not
be alarmed. Of the many points of view from
which the memory of Sir Walter Scott may be
regarded, I shall occupy only three.

There is one, remote indeed from the world's
renown because intimate to any man born a
Briton, which I cannot ignore. To the Briton,
aware of his natal prerogatives, there are few
better than this : that Walter Scott may be,
first a living part of his childhood, and then the
entertainer of his youth, before he becomes the
companion of riper years. I remember vividly
my delight on discovering the story of Rob Roy

4

SIR WALTER SCOTT

when reading that wonderful book for the third
time at the age of eleven. The earlier attempts
had been breathless plunges into seas of incom-
prehensible dialect ; " adventures of a diver "
hazarded to snatch the pearls of freebooting.
At eleven I was still rather shy of " Diana
Vernon." Later on I fell in love with her, like
the rest of you, and, after further reperusals,
came at last to such an appreciation of " Andrew
Fairservice " as may be vouchsafed to a Briton
who is not a Scot.

But consider the subtle and complex charm
of Scott's novels to any man who savours them
in maturity after looting them as a boy ; to any
man who recalls the young companions with
whom he impersonated their characters, " all
now," in Scott's phrase — for he could turn a
phrase when he cared — " all now sequestered or
squandered " — working at large in the far ranges
of the Empire, or toiling each in his tunnel at
home. Any such, though born a generation
after Scott died, can truly say with Scott's friend.
Lady Louisa Stuart, '^ They awaken in me feel-
ings I could hardly explain to another. They
are to me less like books than like letters one
treasures up, pleasant yet mournful to the soul,
and I cannot open one of them without a
thousand recollections." That is one point of
view.

Yes ; but turn the page in the Letters (i.
49) for Scott's reply to his friend, and you

5

SIR WALTER SCOTT

read — in the language of courteous formality
which belonged to his time and in no way
justifies the absurd charge of undue deference to
rank sometimes preferred against him — " I am
very glad your Ladyship found the tales in some
degree worth your notice. It cost me a terrible
effort to finish them, for between distress of
mind and body I was unfit for literary composi-
tion. But in justice to my booksellers I was
obliged to dictate while I was scarce able to
speak for pain." Thus, in the one year 1819,
at the age of 48, did Scott give to Scotland
and the world, in seven volumes, The Bride of
hammer moor. The Legend of Montrose, and Ivanhoe.
And thus he fought on for thirteen more years,
showering forth volumes each one of which
was received with ecstasy by Europe ; but, for
himself, toiling and suffering, yet gentle and
undaunted, through ruin due to the fault of
others, through bereavement, through fear — the
only fear he knew — lest increasing illness should
destroy that magic faculty by which he was
determined to vindicate a chivalrous point of
honour and to safeguard the home on which
his human affections were set. That, gentle-
men, is another point of view. From it we
may contemplate, not the story-teller who
entranced our boyhood, nor the singer of
Romance, nor the delineator of character, nor
the patriot who revealed Scotland to herself as
another Normandy of high-born hearts, nor the

6

SIR WALTER SCOTT

essayist, nor the biographer, nor the captain in
a world-wide literary movement ; but simply,
a Man ; a man so brave, so kind, so sensible,
that he encourages our manhood and knocks the
nonsense out of us all.

What a man ! Think of his magnanimity.
He, of all men, wrote the only generous criticism
on the Third Canto of Childe Harold (1816) at
a moment when the world, for reasons, good,
bad, and idiotic, united to crush the rival who
had eclipsed his poetic fame. His criticism was
generous. But it was just. Generosity as a rule
is more true than detraction. What can be
sounder than this, " Almost all (his) characters
. . . are more or less Lord Byron himself, and
yet you never tire of them. It is the same
set of stormy emotions acting on the same
powerful mind ... it is the same sea dashing
on the same rocks, yet presented to us under
such a variety of appearance that they have all
the interest of novelty." When Byron dies in
1824, it is Scott, the Bayard without reproach,
who writes, " I have been terribly distressed at
poor Byron's death. In talents he was un-
equalled, and his faults were those rather of a
bizarre temper . . . than any depravity of dis-
position. He was devoid of selfishness, which
I take to be the basest ingredient in the human
composition."

If that was his attitude towards the rival
who had beaten him in poetry, so was it towards

7

SIR WALTER SCOTT

the partner who had ruined him in business.
In the shock of the crash that levelled the whole
edifice of his hopes, he can say, " To nourish
angry passions against a man whom I really
liked, would be to lay a blister on my own
heart."

Think of his sterling sense. He liked an
artist to be " a right good John Bull, bland and
honest and open, without any . . . nonsensical
affectation." " Having observed," he writes,
" how very unhappy literary persons are made
(not to say ridiculous into the bargain) by
pitching their thoughts and happiness on popular
fame," I " resolved to avoid at least that error."
Some recent contributors to a literary corre-
spondence may be pained to hear that Scott
cared for popularity only as a means to support-
ing his family and paying twenty shillings in the
pound. For that he would work " at the rate
of ;r24,ooo a year," checked only by this saving
reflection — " but then we must not bake buns
faster than people have appetite to eat them."

He loved individual liberty. No cobbler, if
he had his way, should lose his stall to facilitate
street improvements. That was before the days
of the London County Council.

But turn from that to his public patriotism.
When things were not going too well with our
armies and Joanna Baillie despaired to him of
our country's future : " I detest croaking," says
he; " if true, it is unpatriotic, and if false, worse.

SIR WALTER SCOTT

. . . My only ambition," he goes on, " is to be
remembered, if remembered at all, as one who
knew and valued national independence, and
would maintain it in the present struggle to the
last man and the last guinea, tho' the last guinea
were my own property, and the last man my
own son."

The claims of individual liberty and public
patriotism have blinded some men to the nicest
scruples of personal honour. But they never
blinded Scott. " If," he writes, " I were capable
in a moment of weakness of doing anything
short of what my honour demanded, I would
die the death of a poisoned rat in a hole, out
of mere sense of my own degradation." No
wonder that he fought on ! Refusing a touch-
ing offer of help with the observation, " There
is much good in the world, after all. But I
will involve no friend, either rich or poor. My
own right hand shall do it." It is not as if he
liked labour. He loathed it. So he recalls his
" flourishing plantations," and exclaims, "...
Barbarus has segetes, I will write my finger-
ends off first."

The morning rays of youthful enterprise
faded out from the " sober twilight " in which
he laboured. But he is never gloomy. On the
contrary, he illumines his solitude with beams
of the mellowest humour and flashes of delight-
ful wit. It is we who are sad ; not he ;
haranguing " Madam Duty " and calling her the

9 '

SIR WALTER SCOTT

plainest word in the English language. And, as
Swinburne has pointed out, now that we have
the 'Journal^ we need no longer be sad. For we
see him as he was, gay and buoyant to the last ;
not tortured by Fortune, as we thought, but
rounding on the fickle goddess with the
merriest quips, until weariness and suffering
wring from him the first faltering note — " I
often wish I could lie down and sleep without
waking. But I will fight it out, if I can."
And he just could. Death released him in the
moment of victory. He was wont, in his
modesty, to disparage the writer by comparison
with the soldier. But Wolf did not die more
gloriously on the Heights of Abraham. And
when he died we are glad to know that " every
newspaper in Scotland and many in England
had signs of mourning usual on the " death *' of
a king." His royal soul passed on its way from
a sorrowing nation. If there can be an epic
in the intimate prose of one man's private letters
and journal, the your?jal and Letters of Sir
Walter Scott are an epic of the British home.

I have touched on the redoubled delight
which the novels can give to any man who has
read them as a boy. I have dwelt on the part
which Scott himself played as a man. He was
a great man. But was he a great artist .? That
is my third point of view. If we are to consider
him fairly from that point of view, we must strip
from his works the glamour reflected on them,

lO

SIR WALTER SCOTT

both from our own early associations, and from
our present knowledge of the personality which
he was at such pains to dissemble.

What did he accomplish as an artist ? What
effects of his art endure ? We must face these
questions in an artistic age, when so few achieve
anything memorable, and so many assert that the
mighty dead lacked finish. Scott " gives himself
away " to the apostles of precious sterility. Let
us make that admission. But let us also make
the corresponding claim. He gives himself
away in harvests. He was not, all allow, " a
barren rascal," and we need not review the
amount of his work. But neither, all must
concede, was he a punctilious creator. " His
literary life " resembled, he tells us, " the natural
life of a savage ; absolute indolence interchanged
with hard work." And we know, again from
him, that he cheerfully ended the second volume
of a novel without " the slightest idea how the
story was to be wound up to a catastrophe." In
what sense, then, was he a great artist, or as we
hold in this Club, one of the greatest ? Scott
could turn a phrase with precision when he
pleased ; none better. But let us go deeper.

A great artist, interpreting mankind to men,
and reconciling man to his lot, does one of two
things ; and the greatest do both. He either
bequeathes a vast completed monument to pos-
terity, or else he invents a new method as a
guide to future endeavour. Scott's claim under

II

SIR WALTER SCOTT

the first head is not in dispute. Let us establish
his claim under the second head ; his claim to
have invented a method that was both new and
dynamic.

To do that I will put a competent and
impartial witness into the box. I am too
ignorant to be competent, too enamoured to be
impartial.

I put Nassau Senior into the box. I have
by me his reviews of the novels conveniently
collected from the Quarterly and bound in one
volume. To read them is to look back at the
immediate impression made by the novels on a
critic, competent, impartial, even I may say
hostile. Senior, educated at Eton, and dis-
tinguished at Oxford, belongs, in terms of the
conflict between " Classics and Romantics,"
distinctly to the Classical tradition, and is apt
enough to behave " in that concatenation
accordingly." He writes in 1821, seven years
after Waverley was published, still in ignorance
of its authorship so complete, that he notes an
heraldic error committed by the " unknown "
in Ivanhoe, and, turning to Marmion^ wonders at
the coincidence of" a similar mistake in his great
rival, Sir Walter Scott." And this is what he
says — or rather what " we " say, for he never
relaxes the august plural of GifFord's critical
engine : — " We shall never forget the disappoint-
ment and listlessness with which in the middle
of a watering-place long vacation We tumbled a

12

SIR WALTER SCOTT

new, untalked-of, anonymous novel out of the
box which came to Us from Our faithless
librarian, filled with substitutes for everything
We had ordered. . . . We opened it, at hazard,
in the second volume, and instantly found
Ourselves, with as much surprise as Waverley
... in the centre of the Chevalier's court.
Little did We suspect while we wondered who
this literary giant might be, that seven years
after. We should be reviewing so many more of
his volumes." Senior looks back once again, in
1824, to the wonderful day on which he first
read Waverley in the seaside lodging-house, " little
aware that the work which was delighting us
was to form an epoch in the literary history of
the world." My hostile Classical witness gives
abundant testimony to the novelty and force of
Scott's art.

Its immediate effect was no less evident to
all non- critical contemporaries. A Hungarian
tradesman pointed out the bust of '* le sieur
Valtere Skote " as the portrait of " I'homme le
plus celebre en I'Europe." Dr. Walsh, travelling
from Constantinople to England, found the fame
of Scott's works at every stage from the frontier
of Christendom. But let us consider the moment
at which Scott produced this effect.

It was in 18 14, the year of the Congress of
Vienna, that Scott, " rummaging in the drawers
of an old cabinet," found the mislaid MS. of
Waverley, and " took the fancy of finishing it."

13

SIR WALTER SCOTT

He did finish the last two volumes in the course
of three summer weeks, and writes, " I had a
great deal of fun in the accomplishment of this
task, though I do not expect that it will be
popular in the South, as much of the humour, if
there be any, is local, and some of it even
professional." Yet it is odds to-day that the
name of Waverley is familiar to as many as the
names of Castlereagh or Metternich.

Scott produced this effect at the climax of a
series of political convulsions which had wracked
the diplomacy and shattered the armies of
Europe. Blood enough had been spilled. And
now ink was to be spilled. For that one book
did more than any other to precipitate the
controversy between Classics and Romantics.
And Scott did more than any other writer to
give impulse and area to the Romantic School.

By what method, we may ask, did he make
the Chevalier interesting in 1814 not only to
Senior, my Classical witness, but to nations who
knew nothing of Scottish manners, and cared
little enough, I daresay, for an abortive effort
to retrieve one lost crown prosecuted in an age
almost forgotten by men who had seen the
crowns of all Europe redistributed, by the
Revolution, by Napoleon, and the Congress ?

Let us look at his method. Waverley , Guy
Mannering, Redgauntlet are written, as Scott
himself tells us, round the professional know-
ledge of a lawyer with a predilection for

14

SIR WALTER SCOTT

lawlessness. Their origins are of the driest.
Never did such irritating grains of sand excite
the production of such pearls. These cannot be
accidents of Scott's temperament and vocation.
We cannot explain him as a literary oyster.
Indeed, the image is inadequate. They are not
pearls, but, rather, gems bespeaking design.
Senior tries to explain the method of their
execution. He addresses himself to a new
harmony in literature and seeks to account
for its charm. He notes that the author of
Waverley painted two classes : beggars and gipsies,
sovereigns and their favourites, " the very
lowest and the very highest ranks of society,"
better " than that rank to which he must himself
belong." And asks how the author came to
copy more correctly what he knew imperfectly,
than what he knew well ? After canvassing the
question, backwards and forwards, he concludes
that portraits partly imagined may be more true
than portraits wholly observed ; and so affirms
that Scott, by employing both imagination and
observation in conjunction, had indeed discovered
a new method which saved him from two
dangers : the danger " of losing general re-
semblance in too close a copy of individuals with
whom he was intimate," and the further danger
*' of introducing effort . . . over-colouring and
caricature ... in his endeavour to render strik-
ing . . . representations of the well-known."
Now those are the errors of Realism. Senior

15

SIR WALTER SCOTT

saw that it was a mistake, by focussing the
obvious, to belie general experience widely
imagined ; and a greater mistake to make the
obvious grotesque in order to redeem it from
dulness.

Scott avoided these two errors to which
realism is prone. But he did far more, which
was not apparent to a Classic making reluctant
concessions to a Romantic. Senior gets at half
the truth of Scott's new departure, but only at
half.

In order to get at the whole truth ; in order
to understand the magnitude of Scott's innova-
tion, we must consider the condition of literature
at the moment when he rummaged in the
drawers of that old cabinet.

Scott's complete achievement is still obscured
to us by the conflict between Classics and
Romantics. Nor is that strange. The din and
dust of the conflict puzzled even the protagonists
engaged in it. You have Goethe declaring
" The Classic is health, the Romantic disease."
And you have Victor Hugo, dubbed, like Scott,
a leader of the Romantics, denying the existence
of the conflict and even the meaning of the
terms. Hugo asserts, in 1824, that the two
battle-cries — les deux mots de guerre — have no
meaning unless, indeed, " Classic " meant only
literature of an earlier epoch, and Romantic
only literature that had developed with the
nineteenth century.

16

SIR WALTER SCOTT

But that will not do. The romantic
movement, and the conflict, were each of them
real enough. And two qualifications must be
added. In the first place, the romantic move-
ment derived from a date far anterior to 1800,
from Macpherson's Ossian (1761-63), Wal-
pole's Castle of Otranto (1764), and Bishop
Percy's Reiiques (1765). The movement then
migrated to Germany, and became fantastic.
It returned to Britain and became gruesome. In
the second place, the conflict was not a straight
issue between Classics and Romantics. That is
why Hugo and others misunderstood what they
were fighting about. The conflict was more
truly a triangular turmoil between Classics,
Romantics, and Realists. It was launched by
Classics on the monstrous developments to
which romantic and realistic methods had been
pushed. The Classics were making reprisals on
both, and Scott defeated those reprisals by com-
bining the two.

Romance founded on imagination, and
Realism founded on observation, are the
primary methods by which the mind seeks to
express the need of the heart. The classic
method is a secondary mode. It can be, and
had been, applied alike to the Romantic and the
Realistic. Throughout the eighteenth century
the classic mode had selected and polished
until the element of wonder had disappeared
from literature's image of life. The romantic

17

SIR WALTER SCOTT

image, classically treated, had become, as it
were, a statue in a nobleman's park. The
realistic image, classically treated, had become,
as it were, any party of nobodies — " buddies," I
think, vou call them in Scotland — seated round
a table, and applying delicate seismometers to
every tremor, however faint, with which the
heart responds to any fact, however trivial. This
was too dull ; yes, and too false to life, in which
wonder is the most constant element. After
smoothing the romantic into the inane, it had
to be galvanised into the diabolic. After
sweetening the realistic with sentiment, it had
to be salted with satire. The passion for
wonder revived, and was gratified. It was
indulged till the Romantic School, developing
into the School of Horror, turned their statue
into a hobgoblin ; and the Realistic School,
developing into a School of Scandal, turned their
" nobodies " into high-tobymen and demi-reps.
Each tried to tickle or shock. The romance
of Ossian was exaggerated to the gruesome by
Monk Lewis. The realism of Defoe was spiced
to the satirical ; delightfully by the incompar-
able Jane Austen, and outrageously by ruder
hands. Peacock, whose Maid Marian appeared
in 1 8 1 9 with Ivanhoe, combines both extrava-
gances in the satirical-fantastic.

It is here that Scott intervenes with moment-
ous effect and enduring results. He eschewed,
as Senior noted, the excesses of the Realists.

i8

SIR WALTER SCOTT

But he also eschewed the excesses of the
Romantics. He rejected the fantastic from
romance and the cynical from realism. His
huge performance was to hark back to the first
springs of each, at the moment when the Classics
declared war on the enormities to which both
were committed.

Scott stepped back — so to say — to embrace
a wider panorama of humanity and, from a
position of artistic detachment, painted what he
saw, tinged by the aerial perspective of wonder.
His image of life is the " verissima, dulcissima
imago " ; true, but not trite ; sweet, but not
false ; wonderful, but not inhuman. He made
an epoch in literature by creating romantic-
realism ; by clothing actuality with atmo-
sphere ; by striking a richer chord from notes
of human experience which till then had been
sounded singly.

No doubt he was lucky — like all conquerors.
He happened to have loved the old romantic
poetry, and imitated it admirably in his early
poems. He happened to have understood the
new realistic prose, and explained Defoe's
method in his famous analysis of Mrs. Veal's
apparition " the next day after her death." So,
in 1 8 14, he trained the two into one channel,
and drew off their united power from the welter
of literary cross-currents. He produced a pure
stream of literary energy. And that stream
flowed for fifty years and more, turning the

19

SIR WALTER SCOTT

mills of many movements even outside literature ;
of the Oxford movement in religion ; the
Young England movement in politics, and the
Morris-Rossetti movement in art.

His achievement as an artist is that he
appealed to the general feelings of mankind by
truth, wonder, and charm.

Perhaps his strangest charm is woven by
his unexpected reconciliations — of the lawyer
and outlaw, of the servant and master, of
the Jacobite and Hanoverian, of Scotland
and England, of " Time long past " and
" To-day."

By these reconciliations ; by searching for
hidden chords of human experience, he feels his
way to the supreme reconciliation of man to
man's destiny. That is the work, often un-
conscious, of great masters. But for their
magical counterpoint the present would be all
to each of us ; " an apex," Pater calls it,
" between two hypothetical eternities " ; a
naked note, so poignant that it pierces. As
Landor puts it, " The present, like a note of
music, is nothing but as it appertains to what
is past and what is to come." But how few
among writers, classic, romantic, or realistic,
have shown this by their art. Walter Scott
is of those few. He extracted secrets from
oblivion to endow what is with the mystery of
what has been ; and, so, puts us in case to
expect the future. He strikes a full chord

20

SIR WALTER SCOTT

upon the keys of time. It is only the greatest
musicians of humanity who thus exalt the
present by fealty to the past and make it a
herald of eternal harmonies.

He leads us through the maze of time and
seems to hold a clue. We wander with him,
and we wonder with him, till we believe with
him that the labyrinth of man's fate must lead
some whither worth our seeking.

And he made light of all this. But for
necessity that clamped him to the desk till his
pen dropped from a dying hand, he would have
bade farewell to his task with a Sidney's

Splendidis longum valedico nugis.

Yet his radiant trifles are the regalia of his
native land, and symbols of a suzerainty that
still influences the literature of Europe. That
is much. But there is more. His worth as a
man excels his work as an author. It is an
example of valour to all men, in all lands,
for ever.

Gentlemen, I ask you to drink, in reverent
silence, to the undying and beloved memory
of Sir Walter Scott.

21

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